The Gospel Topics essay Joseph Smith’s Teachings about Priesthood, Temple, and Women is a useful resource on the role early Latter-day Saint women played in areas such as healings. In a recent volume on the history of LDS women, we read the following about women receiving spiritual gifts and participating in healings that were effectual:
During the nineteenth century, hearing unknown languages was a common occurrence at both Latter-day Saint worship services and at informal home gatherings, to the point of becoming routine and unexceptional. The nature of this language was unclear. Wells thought the strange words could be a primordial Indian dialect or the pure language of Adam (Emmeline B. Wells, “A Venerable Woman, Presendia Lathrop Kimball,” Woman’s Exponent [June 1, 1883]:2). While glossolalia was typically translated, diaries rarely explained what actually was said. Communicating an explicit message was less important than conveying a general feeling of spiritual empowerment and comfort. At times of celebration, during periods of anxiety, or even during routine church meetings, women experienced the intense spirit of the Lord.
Speaking and singing in tongues was often accompanied by women blessing and prophesizing. In 1894 a Canadian couple asked the community’s spiritual leader, Charles Ora card, to bless the new home they had built. Card described in his diary how the couple had been fasting and praying, hoping that his wife, Zina Presendia, might speak in tongues. Zina did speak in tongues, but then she “put her hands on their heads as if to bless them. She did upon mine [Charles] more particularly and with longer duration” Atena, the woman who owned the home, interpreted what Zina has said. Then Atena herself prophesized, telling Charles he would eventually be free from debt. “This comfort[ed] me very much for I long to see the day,” Charles wrote. “We had a spiritual feast and spent the evening in conversing,” he concluded. “God blest us much” (Donald G. Godfrey and Brigham Young Card, Diaries of Charles Ora Card: The Canadian Years [Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993], 269, for December 23, 1894). The Gifts of the Holy Spirit were just that, the gifts that came to some and not to others.
By far the most widespread spiritual gift experienced by women was the ability to heal. Healing was an essential part of Latter-day Saint life because illness and death were unavoidable, as they were everywhere in nineteenth-century America. No family could boast of being free from pain, suffering, and grief. Children contracted scarlet fever, chicken pox, and pneumonia. In 1880 Eliza Lyman observed that “to see a beloved child suffering the pains of Death without the power to relieve them in the least is almost too much for human nature to bear” (Eliza Marian Partridge Lyman, diary, March 19, 1880). Adults fared little better. Most available medical treatments took place at home, and so women intimately interacted with the sick and disabled. Women managed the “gates of mortality,” both introducing new souls into the world and smoothing their transition into the next (Susanna Morrill, “Relief Society Birth and Death Rituals: Women at the Gates of Mortality,” Journal of Mormon History 36 [Spring 2010]:129).
The models of healing exist within Christianity in general and in Mormonism in particular. In the first, healing was one of several spiritual gifts given by God to believers, including women (1 Corinthians 12:9). The father of Joseph Smith, recognized as the “patriarch” of the church, gave special blessings (Patriarchal Blessings) that recognized such gifts in women. In 1835 he told Elizabeth Ann Whitney (later Wells’s sister wife in Nauvoo), “When thy husband is far from thee and thy little ones are afflicted thou shalt have power to prevail and they shall be healed” (Gregory A. Prince, Power from on High: The Development of Mormon Priesthood [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1995], 202). In 1842 Joseph Smith himself chided those who questioned women’s healing abilities. “Respecting the female laying on hands,” he explained, “there could be no devils in it if God gave his sanction by healing—that there could be no more sin in any female laying hands on the sick than in wetting the face with water—that it is no sin for anybody to do it that has faith” (Minutes off the Sixth Meeting of the Society, April 28, 1842, in “A Book of Records, Containing the proceedings of The Female Relief Society of Nauvoo,” March 17, 1842-March 16, 1844). Women practiced healing throughout the nineteenth century.
In the second model, healing was tied to church offices typically occupied by men. In his 1931 revelations on healing, Smith explained how it worked: two or more elders should be called to pray and lay their hands on the afflicted person (D&C 42:44). In another revelation, William E. McLellin was told to “lay your hands upon the sick, and they shall recover” (D&C 66:9). These revelations echoed the epistle of James (5:14), who also mentioned that the elders of the church would anoint the sick with oil in the name of the Lord. For Smith, women could also be marked to heal, although it is unclear how he is using the word “ordain”: “Wherein they are ordained, it is the privilege of those set apart to administer in what authority which is confer’d on them—and if sisters should have faith to heal the sick, let all hold their tongues, and let everything roll on” (Ibid.) Women might be “set apart” by others in the church for healing. In this version of the model, healing required the acknowledgement of authority figures.
Throughout most of the nineteenth century, these two models for healing existed simultaneously and peacefully. Women healed, and they called on men to heal. In 1878, after the deaths of four of her children and the near death of a son who had disemboweled himself on a pitchfork. Margaret Ballard’s husband fell ill. First the elders were called and they attempted to heal him, but he did not seem to be recovering. According to Margaret, “a voice came to me and said, ‘administer to him,’ but I was very timid about this for the brethren had just administered to him.” then the voice came again, but “I felt that they would think me bold and I was very weak. The voice came to me this third time and I heeded to its promptings and went and put my hands upon his head. The Spirit of the Holy Ghost was with me and I was filled with a Divine strength in performing the ordinance.” A few years later, her father had a serious case of pneumonia, and Margaret again healed after the elders left. He recalled her father saying, “Thank God for this blessing, I knew this power was in the church and I thank Him for it” (Margaret McNeil Ballard, autobiography [1917], BYU). From Margaret’s perspective, while it was her own divine gift that enabled her husband and father to recover, this did not negate thecal to the elders nor did they impede her efforts. (Colleen McDannell, Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy [New York: Oxford University Press, 2018], 6-8)
